Two months in such a small country, and I was ready to cross borders, which I did this weekend when my friend Will and I took a little excursion eastward to Jordan, one of Israel’s few neighbors that allow travel across the border.
My friend Rebecca had given me a heads up about Jordan, saying that she’d seen almost no women during her time there, and I was watching for this as I left Israel’s tourist playground of Eilat and crossed into the neighboring Jordanian town of Aqaba. Rebecca was very right: there was probably a six-to-one ratio of men to women out on the streets of Aqaba, a touristed and Safeway-studded beach city.
Sand and stalls selling bikinis, circa 1986, were not on the itinerary for this trip, so Will and I quickly headed northward to Wadi Rum, a stunning desert wilderness where we went “trekking,” if that’s the correct term for being driven around in a pick-up truck by a Bedouin guide. Known for their hospitality, Bedouins will invite passers-by into their homes for sugary mint tea, a tradition that stemmed from practicality: if a nomad wanders by your tent you offer him tea and food, knowing that when you’re traveling through the arid desert another Bedouin will invite you in, and potentially save you from dehydration and starvation. The Bedouins we ran into in our four days in Jordan live in immobile cinderblock homes, and the nomads passing by are mostly well-fed and slightly hungover French backpackers. But the tradition has continued, and I grew a cavity or two from the multiple glasses of saccharine tea that I was fed throughout the weekend. But even in the living rooms and courtyards of homes, the women of Jordan were still conspicuously hidden.
Our first cup of tea was in the home of Madullah, whose cousin Abdullah ended up being our desert guide. (More on that story later.) Madullah disappeared to the back of the house to “prepare” the tea, which meant telling his wife to start brewing. A while later, when his young daughter wobbled into the room on a busted tricycle I went to help her readjust the wheel, and from my new vantage point got to see his wife, who was hovering behind the door jamb, staying out of sight and waiting for Madullah to take the tray of tea and serve the guests.
Their living room is covered in painted paneling.
I encountered this throughout the weekend. Bedouin wives (often a couple per husband—polygamy is widespread) would emerge when the guests were just us foreigners. But when local men showed up, the wives disappeared, turning into invisible tea brewers in the back rooms of the house.
So this was my impression of marriage in Jordan when we headed into the desert with a pair of French sisters and our too-cool-his-kifya guide, Abdullah.
Abdullah was filling us in on his life and Bedouin culture. He is married and has two children, but he’s looking for a second wife right now, preferably a foreign woman. As it turns out, I’m what he seems to be looking for. Before heading to the campsite, Abdullah pulled me aside. “I want to talk to you with secret.” He’s already worked it out. I can finish up my year in Jerusalem. Then I’ll head to Jordan, become his second wife, and help him run his business, liasing with the foreigners. “I have a very big house. I will treat you very nice. I will pay for everything. My wife? It’s no problem.” I informed him that actually, yes, it still was a problem, at least for me. “No, it’s not.” Uh, yeah, it is. He offered a trial period where I could just be his girlfriend, starting that evening at the campsite. No thanks, Abdullah.
The friendly guide schtick quickly turned into the surly guide of wounded pride schtick, and that lasted for the rest of the trek. The following morning, returning to Rum Village, our sandy entourage was of course brought in for tea at Abdullah’s home, where we met his tea-brewing wife and their two kids. Compared to the wives I had met so far, Mrs. Abdullah seemed a bit feistier than most. She had painted toenails, she chilled in the living room with us, and she didn’t cover her head until she went outside to fetch her husband’s cigarettes from the truck. This could be my life. Mom? Dad? Do you want to weigh in here? You might get a herd of goats out of the deal.
Wadi Rum is spectacular, by the way:
These are pretty old.
This is the Bedouin-style campsite where we spent the night in the desert.
To counter this culture that was such a shock to me, I had a great experience when Will and I hiked up to a spring set back in a sandstone canyon on the edge of Rum Village.
First, these boys sitting on the trail offered me a piece of baloney.
As we got deeper into the canyon, we started to hear the sounds of drumming and singing echoing off the rock walls until we saw a group of people gathered up ahead at the spring. Pretty soon we could make out hijab-covered heads, so Will stayed back while I hiked ahead to this group of young women gathered in the middle of a lonely canyon. It was a fieldtrip from the local girls' school, and the students and teachers had hiked up here where they were singing, dancing and beating out hot rhythms on a drum that the teachers passed from one to another. They invited me over as I approached, fed me tea, and one of the girls pulled me into the circle to dance with her as all her classmates let out these great tongue-wagging trills and laughed at the atrocity of me trying to dance like a Bedouin and her trying to groove like an American college student on MTV's "Spring Break: Cancun.” I let Will wait back on the trail for a good 30 minutes as I hung out with these women who were having such a great time with each other and not just shuffling around kitchens with teapots chained to their ankles.
Here are some of the teachers. Most of the students were in their late-teens and didn’t want to be photographed.
We spent two days in Wadi Rum. Day Two Will and I hiked a few miles into the desert and spent the day sitting under this rock, orbiting around with the shade and watching camel trains plod across the desert.
Then we went to Petra, which might be a world wonder, where there are massive facades carved out of cliff faces and more than lots of in-your-face Bedouins selling Petra kitsch. I got scammed and paid four times too much for a necklace made out of camel teeth. Serves me right.
Lots of colorful stone in Petra:
This is a German film crew that stuck a Bedouin family inside a little cave to interview them for a documentary. The girls in the foreground demanded one dinar for taking their picture. I pretended I didn’t speak English.
Here’s Will playing geologist in Wadi Rum. He leaves tomorrow for Azerbaijan, Georgia, and a few other countries you might have trouble finding on a map. Then he goes home to Maine.
